This Is The Coolest Wheelchair You'll See Today

If we can get a man on the moon and Tony Hawk on a hoverboard, then we’ve certainly got the capability to upgrade wheelchairs. There’s a hell of a lot of potential out there but still not much innovation.

That’s exactly why one man from New Zealand, after seeing his ‘mate’ struggling to perform simple tasks on his old chair, took matters into his own hands. After years of development and an ingenuous reconstruction of a Segway, Kevin Halsall unveiled the Ogo—a souped-up wheelchair fit for Professor X.

His prototype for the Ogo is set to revolutionize the industry. Its key feature borrows from the Segway—an active moving seat control. It moves in a certain direction depending on how you lean in the seat. If you put your weight forward, the Ogo will move forward as well. It’s completely intuitive and renders the need for hand controls obsolete.

This means two things: your hands are completely free for anything else, like dribbling a ball or mowing the lawn, and your core muscles are used to constantly maintain balance, so they won’t ever atrophy. This is “something’s that got the occupational therapist very excited,” says Halsall. Also, six-pack status.

Users can swap out regular wheels for larger, all-terrain ones to permit zipping down the beach or travel on uneven pathways like never before. The Ogo can move at over 12 mph.

While there are plenty of more ways we could be tricking out wheelchairs, the Ogo is a hell of a good start, mostly for that hands-free feature. Its future remains uncertain, and we’re unsure of specifics like battery life, but there’s apparently solid investor interest there.